I began thinking about why am I constructing almost a shadow father or ghost father in my head into Graham Greene in response to the father who created me? What's going on here? I think a part of my sense is it's every boy's story. When we are kids, we imagine that to define ourselves or to find ourselves means charting your own individuality, making your own destiny and actually running away from your parents and your home and what you grew up with.

We can better see what we don't have. The other man's grass is always greener and now we can actually go and visit his grass much more and feel the absence of green in our own lives.

Every day there are small moments when we have a choice: will we take in more stuff, or just clear our minds out for a bit?

Dalai Lama has not coming to show us his kindness, so that we can enjoy his charisma, he's coming with a specific message for the specific circumstances of the world today.

Dalai Lama was leading his country during the rigors of World War II, he was in Beijing for a year in 1954; he was up against Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai from the time that he was fifteen. So he's no newcomer or naive when it comes to politics.

I think that mass communications as well as mass travel have made the whole world available to us in ways that they haven't been. As with any kind of freedom, the more of it that one has the greater the need for limit and restraint. But I think that it's a nice challenge to be saddled with.

I think of the Dalai Lama as a doctor of the mind offering medicine and specific counsel and cures in the way a great doctor would.